Gnome Settings Daemon overrides Xorg mouse configuration

[Apteryx]

Ubuntu version: Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS
gnome-settings-daemon version: 3.8.6.1-0ubuntu11.2

What I expect to happen:
As a user, when I define custom mouse settings in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/*.conf,
I expect these settings to be honored by the mouse plugin of gnome-settings-daemon.

What happens instead:
The gnome-settings-daemon mouse plugin overrides the Xorg mouse settings.

Steps to reproduce:

1) Create the /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d folder if it does not exist.
2) Add the following configuration to a new file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/80-mouse.conf:
Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "Any Pointer"
        MatchIsPointer "True"
        Option "AccelerationNumerator" "8"
        Option "AccelerationDenominator" "1"
EndSection
3) Log out or use "sudo restart lightdm"
4) Notice your pointer speed is very fast on the login screen, which corresponds to our Xorg configuration.
5) Login. Gnome-daemon-settings will now kick in.
6) Observe that your pointer speed is overriden by the mouse settings in gnome-daemon-settings.

Workaround:
To prevent the Xorg mouse settings from being overridden, the mouse plugin of gnome-settings-daemon must be disabled, using the following command:
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.mouse active false

It could be argued that this is a feature, not a bug. I disagree with this because Xorg configuration allows to do much more than what the gnome-settings-daemon mouse plugin GUI will allow. For example, I might want to remap the buttons on my left hand mouse while keeping the right hand mouse intact. If gnome-settings-daemon would be well behaved, it wouldn't mess with what it cannot handle.

[Tim Lunn (darkxst)]

gnome-settings-daemon just reads the configuration from Xinput I believe. So you should use that to configure your mouse, rather than xorg.conf snippets

[Apteryx (maxco)]

I don't know if xinput configuration is read by gnome-settings-daemon, but it is not a satisfying workaround as it is not permanent across sessions. You could but it inside your ~/.profile, but then it would not work if your mouse is not connected at the time you open your session (think of a bluetooth mouse that is awaken only when you move it, for example). You could hack some udev rules to workaround this, but a) it's ugly and b) hardly work for multiple users (as you have to export a bunch of X related users environment variable, such as $HOME, $DISPLAY and $XAUTHORITY for the xinput commands). In the light of this, Xorg.conf is the only sensible place to configure the input devices settings for all users.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.